It’s interesting that everyday we hear how email is dead yet everyday I see someone using email in a new way. The benefit of using email is that it’s understood by nearly any Internet user as opposed to many of the new social networks that take time and investment to be able to effectively use.

Yesterday I spoke with YouTellYou founder Ruggero Domenichini to learn more about the service. YouTellYou is an easy way to create a photo magazine. The service can pull in photos from photo sharing services including Flickr, Smugmug, Facebook and you can also upload photos from your computer. The magazine can also include a Google Map so you can provide the location where the photos were taken.

Jolie O’Dell at RWW has a good review of the YouTellYou service from their launch back in January. She notes, “In about 10 minutes, we created this story about SxSW 2009. We were able to get access to all the needed Flickr photos through a simple interface. Pics were then organized into layouts of one or two photos per section with optional captions for most layouts.”

Since the initial launch, Ruggero has added email functionality that allows users the ability to email in their photos and captions to YouTellYou and it automatically creates the magazine. This is great for people traveling who want to share more than just photos. The service works a lot like Posterous in that you don’t need a YouTellYou account. Just email your photos to stories@youtellyou.com and the magazine will be setup and login information for future edits will be sent to you. In addition to photos, you can also include audio recordings in your online magazine. Here’s an example magazine using the email functionality.

I like the YouTellYou concept because it allows you to tell a story instead of just posting some photos. When I look back to my last vacation in 2006, my photos on Flickr are great for me to look at but when others look at the photos, some context might help understand more about the photo’s meaning.

Here’s a partial example of a YouTellYou magazine – Jolie created this based on her experiences at the SXSW conference last year.

Find more stories about: Flickr, photos, startups, YouTellYou

The topic of paid social media is something I’ve been thinking about a lot of the past few months. When I met with Scott Monty of Ford, I mentioned the idea of assuming that all social media is paid. Perhaps you already do assume that what you read is already paid or sponsored although I’ve tried to think that what I read is genuine unless otherwise noted. For the purposes of this discussion, I am leaving the “is paid social media good or evil” on the side for another day.

Scott noted that the 100 paid reviewers of the Ford Fiesta will disclose that they are part of the “movement”. That’s great that there will be disclosure – it’s something that many of the paid reviews systems have moved to. And while I am using Ford as an example, they are by no means alone with regards to my question. Whether it’s Izea, Magpie, in-house ad sales, etc, the question continues to grow in importance. And I haven’t even mentioned pimping by investors, friends, family members, etc.

Disclosure is easy on a blog, but what about as the blog entry is pushed around. Does the disclosure travel with the blog entry? And more importantly, what about all of the social media services like Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Plurk, etc.? How do we define disclosure on these networks?

Scott says that twitter messages will be tagged with a #tag. But if I am a new/general user of Twitter, how do I know that #tag means that it’s a sponsored message? Magpie sticks #magpie into the Twitter message but the same question applies. What if I want to note my post about the Ford Fiesta on Twitter – if I use the #tag, does it then appear that it’s a sponsored post? What about users who find a Twitter message via a search? What about retweets (that is where another Twitter user shares a message from another user)?

Melanie Notkin was paid by Disney to push out Twitter messages about a new movie release. In her blog post she noted, “Every time I tweet a ‘sponsored’ tweet from Disney, I will use #SADisney. That way, you’ll know it.” That works for people who have read her blog post, but what about all of the new followers she gets each day, users searching for Disney or people that don’t read her blog. How do they know that she isn’t just saying she likes the Disney movie and is instead getting paid to push messages to her followers?

Twitter’s not alone – what about photos on Flickr or videos on YouTube. Yesterday I watched a video that was paid for by Intel about Intel. The blog post noted that the video was paid but there was nothing in the actual video regarding the sponsored status. Had they put a note upfront about the paid status inside of the video, that would suffice for the video medium. So viewers on Youtube.com or in an embed have no idea the content was paid.

As more companies expand their efforts to buy users in return for authoritative media impressions and content, this issue of paid social media disclosure will only continue to rise. And companies will increase their spend in this area because it’s cheap and provides a greater return than a traditional banner ad or widget.

The bottom line is that just sticking a hashtag (e.g. #tag) on a twitter message, photo or video isn’t enough to properly disclose a relationship.

Could it be that some companies actually like this usage of paid social media because it looks very authentic and they can claim disclosure that most system users will never realize is actually sponsored or paid? I certainly hope not.

We need to come together to to develop standards around social media disclosure so that we never blur the lines between a person paid for their content and those who are doing it out of true passion or concern. On the other hand, we could just assume everything we read on any of the social media sites is paid.

Find more stories about: advertising, Flickr, Ford, money, social media, Social Networking, Twitter, Web 2.0, YouTube

With Yahoo losing people left and right and nearly every media outfit calling them dead, I started to wonder about my data. The Flickr founders left earlier this week and tonight we’ve learned that delicious founder Joshua Schachter has also tendered his resignation (via Dave Sifry).

Now let me be clear that I don’t think Yahoo is closing shop by any stretch of the imagination but the question is a good one for any Web application or company to which we put data into. Certainly has made me think about the Web services I use from both big companies and startups and how often I need to backup the data. This is not about data portability, I am only discussing my data (photos, videos, text) not how other users interact with the data (comments, etc.).

There’s three main services I use on Yahoo: delicious, Flickr and Yahoo Mail. delicious offers an export function which I found easy to use. With regards to Flickr and Yahoo Mail, I was unable to find anyway to save out my entire collection of photos or mail. I’ve got nearly 3,700 photos on Flickr – no way I am saving these out one-by-one. And I was one of the first Yahoo Mail members and it’s still one of my primary email accounts even today. Please let me know if there are ways to export this data in batch form. 

If you are building a Web service, have you considered offering an export function from the beginning? If not, why?

I think today we’ve learned another great lesson. How many horror stories have we heard from people who lost an entire hard drive filled with data. We’ve learned to backup our hard drives to external drives for safety. Perhaps we need to do a better job of backing up our Web services for safety as well. One has no idea when a Web service might not be there the next time you attempt to access it.

Find more stories about: Flickr, Insights, Yahoo!

First reported by Saki earlier this week, it appears Flickr has partnered with Capital One to allow credit card holders to create customized credit cards with Flickr images on the card. It’s about as personalized as you can get.

From what I can tell, most of the selected Flickr images have been rejected by Capital One with no explanation. Kinda sorta how they raise interest rates and/or add fees.

My guess is that the picture of your kid and a Coke can is out along with the picture of your family with Mickey Mouse.

Find more stories about: Flickr, money, Quick News

Yahoo is announcing a partnership with T-Mobile this morning which will bring Yahoo’s mobile services to T-Mobile’s customers. The relationship will start in Europe with Yahoo oneSearch (Yahoo’s mobile search). Yahoo! oneSearch will become the exclusive mobile search service for T-Mobile customers beginning in March.

Yahoo says that eventually other services including Flickr, Messenger, Mail and Weather will be available as well. 

I ask the mobile experts reading this, would you rather be installed directly on the handset like Nokia is doing with Google or on the carrier as discussed here with Yahoo?

Find more stories about: Flickr, mobile, Quick News, yahoo

Photo-sharing site Flickr has announced a new project within the Flickr site called "The Commons". They describe this new project as, "There are two main aims to The Commons project, starting with the pilot: firstly, to increase exposure to the amazing content currently held in the public collections of civic institutions around the world, and secondly, to facilitate the collection of general knowledge about these collections, with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search."

Over 3,000 photos from the Library of Congress are featured as the first member of The Commons. Learn more about the project on the flickr blog. Check out the main The Commons section on Flickr. Flickr is looking for your help to accurately tag the photos to help others find them.

These types of deals for Flickr can only help push it further into the mainstream which could help it gain that all-important market share.

Find more stories about: Flickr, photos, Quick News

My friend Corsin pointed me to a new Flickr-based application called PhotoPhlow today. And after playing with it for a couple of hours, I will say that it might be the most fun and functional application I’ve seen in quite a while. It’s currently in private beta so you will need someone to invite you.

There’s a brief video which is worth watching about how the service works. Here’s the basic overview: tie PhotoPhlow into your flickr account and then you can create chat rooms which tie into flickr to pull photos from. So imagine IRC with the ability to find and share photos inside of the chat. Inside of the chat, certain words become links into flickr search. Once you find an image, you can share it with the chatroom.

You can also do most of the functions inside of flickr on PhotoPhlow including tagging, photo info (exif), comments, etc. When you select a photo, it appears on the right with all of the information about the photo on flickr (see screenshot below). They offer badges for your flickr page to draw people into your PhotoPhlow chatroom.

I could see using it to create a subway chat and then loading and image and others who are interested in subways can participate in the discussion.

As a bonus, it even ties into Twitter! You can message from the chatroom directly into twitter using IRC-like commands. And they recently added Tumbr functionality so if someone shares a photo within a chat, you can send it directly to your Tumblelog.

I’ve got to say that going in I wasn’t thinking that I would see this as something I could imagine using but after playing with it, it’s hot. Outside of personal use, agencies could use this to share design work and chat about it in real-time. The designer loads an image, and then the team can chat about it and also find other images within Flickr to discuss. It *could* have educational possibilities as well.

The only part I’m not crazy about is having to give them access to my flickr account to become a member. Perhaps I want to participate in the conversation and I am not a flickr member. It shouldn’t be a requirement for an account.

ConceptShare should look at this functionality as part of their service – would be hot to import Flickr photos into CS for annotation and team sharing.

Find more stories about: chat, Flickr, irc, PhotoPhlow, Reviews, Social Networking

Today my thoughts and prayers are with everyone affected by the fires in California. The pictures show a scene straight out of a war movie. I thought it would be interesting to look at how the popular social media services are being used to report on the fires. Putting the various sites together shows an almost live look at what’s going on across the region. One thing I do notice is that there is no central keyword or search term to find everything, everyone lists their content in a different way. An idea would be to create "crisis centers" and aggregate the content together for easy locating.

Flickr

• Flickr is adding one image per minute on the top tags for the fire. Check out Irvine Fire and Santiago Fire for examples
• Terry P has a good number of photos on the Santiago fires

YouTube

• YouTube is showing several thousand videos when you aggregate the various searches. The top search is california fire returning close to 3,000 videos.

Sample video:

Google

• Google news keeps track of the news from sites that they consider news worthy
• Google blog search includes basically everyone else
• The LA Times has a Google Maps mashup showing where the fires are burning (hat tip to Robert Scoble)
• Another mashup of San Diego allowing GPS and coordinate submissions

Facebook

• A search returns nothing on "California Fire"

MySpace

• A search returns nothing on "California Fire"

Mahalo

• I have included Mahalo, not because it’s a major site, but because it’s new and has a mission of helping users find what they are looking for better than typical searching
• Mahalo has pages for: Malibu Fire, and the master page California Fires
• Both pages are good attempts at organizing the information, the California fires page is somewhat current, Malibu fires is a bit more outdated. The California fires page shows videos from yesterday but most of the news is from today which is good. I would suggest they point to searches on YouTube, Flickr, etc. to keep that page updated with more current information

Wikipedia

• Wikipedia has a great overview page of the various fires, locations and links to news

Twitter

• Edware Vielmetti submitted the following 2 news Twitter streams: @kpbsnews and @nateritter

What other sites are doing a good job of social media during these troubling times?

Find more stories about: California Fires, Flickr, Mahalo, Quick News, YouTube

YouTube has announced today that they are launching new localized versions of their service. Flickr announced the same last week amidst concerns from German users over a concern about censorship.

What I wanted to discuss here is whether a user say in Italy would rather have a localized version of YouTube or an Italian company providing video sharing? Would a user in Germany prefer to have German flickr which is really just a translation of the American version or a German company providing similar features?

Flickr/YouTube have basically translated the site using a technique called "Internationalization and Localization" also called "i18n and L10n". Simplified, they take the bits of text across the site, translate them and can now offer a new version of the site in x language.

Franz Patzig posted (in German) some examples of the poor translations that Flickr is currently using. How many people will leave the service for this reason? I know that for me, when I use services that are clearly non-english oriented but where they attempted to make an English version, it doesn't sit well with me.

Here is a screenshot of the "new" Italian YouTube. You can see that the images have not translated. Does this piss you off as an Italian user? Does it seem like a "half-assed" job?

I don't have all of the answers but thought this might be a good bit for discussion. Till has posted a list of Flickr alternatives.  Till is a German and his list is a combo of both German and not companies.

Which do you prefer, if any? A localized version of a service, a local company offering similar service, or neither, the original language version? For example, if you are a native Italian, will you continue to use YouTube in the "native" English? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

Find more stories about: Flickr, localization, YouTube

Earlier today, I posted an article from Franz Patzig about flickr and the censorship from their German customers. Someone then submitted it to Digg. About thirty minutes ago I received an email noting that on Digg, the Google ads somehow matched the story about flickr censorship to ads for Hitler's ringtones.

See the image below. What's interesting to me about this is two things: the content matching might be close to correct I guess if you assume that "germany + censorship" might equal "hitler" but ringtones? Clicking the link gives me one of those crappy monthly ringtone services but no mention of Hitler.

The "social context" is what's missing in these ads. "Hitler Ringtones" which has nothing to do with Hitler looks like SEO desperation on the advertiser's part…Google (and the others) also has a real weakness with the social context of terms.  Someone I was chatting with this afternoon mentioned that phrase to me with regards to ads, and you have to wonder as more of us create content online, whether ad companies will start to use this as a part of their matching systems. The algorithms don't understand social context or meaning.

Do you have good examples of very poor ad matching? Leave them in the comments.

Find more stories about: advertising, Flickr, Google

Update: It appears several sites are confirming what we first reported yesterday. Check out the confirmations on ReadWriteWeb and Mashable. The official post is now available on the flickr blog.

This is unconfirmed but I have heard that Flickr will be launching several new languages (localization / internationalization) this coming week. Supporting this theory, community manager Heather Champ appears to be heading on an international tour of "24 Hours of Flickr" events based on her Upcoming event listing, hitting events in London, Berlin, Paris and Montreal.

If you have more details, please feel free to contact us. We'll also be watching for any response from Zooomr, which has, to date, touted its multi-lingual support as one of its primary benefits over Flickr.

Find more stories about: Flickr, Quick News

In all of the interviews I have conducted, everyone believes customer service is vital to their business. And I believe it is crucial as well. After my documented experiences with Technorati, I decided to randomly pick 10 current web apps and put them to the test! One week ago, I sent each one a very basic e-mail for support. I gave each one a week to reply and below are the responses I received with my comments and a score for each one. Some did well, some did ok, some did poor. Let’s check out the winners and the losers!

The tested apps are in alpha order: Digg, Dogster, Edgeio, Faces, Flickr, MySpace, Skype, Technorati, Youtube

So here are the results! In best to worst order:

Dogster

For my inquiry they provided a form with the following confirmation after submission:

Woof Woof! We got your message.
We’ll definitely be reading it and get back to you within 72 hours (weekend may take a little longer).

Thanks so much for using and loving Dogster.

Bark, bark, bark!

Dogster: for the love of dog!

And their reply came in about 36 hours and included the following:

Allen,

We welcome all dogs from Heinz 57 mutts to pedigreed show dogs.

As for terriers? Here’s our breed list:

1. Airedale Terrier
2. American Hairless Terrier
9. Boston Terrier

Boston Terrier is right there in the number 9 position (alphabetically).

Thanks for loving Dogster. We love you right back!

Woof!

-dogster-

—————————————————————————-
Dogster & Catster: where no one knows you’re a human
dogster.com / catster.com

The following message was sent by “Allen” on Sat, 7 Oct 2006 14:34:00 -0700.

> Hi – Can you tell me if any kind of dog can be registered on dogster? I have > a small boston terrier and wondered if this type is allowed.
>
> Thank you, Allen

Comments: I appreciate both the confirmation of my submission and the funny, witty reply I received. The reply came in a reasonable amount of time. Great job – woof woof!

Digg

Only offered an e-mail address for inquiries, no form. Reply came within 24 hours and it is below:

Anyone can sign on to digg.com. There are topics for everyone weather
you’re interested in technology or world news. If you have any other
questions, please email us.

Thank you,

-The Digg Support Team.

allen wrote:
> Hi – can you tell me if anyone can register to use digg? I am not a techy but would be interested in rating stories in the business columns and sections. Do I need to be a web developer to sign up? Thanks, Allen

Comments: Digg would have been number one except for two small concerns. One is that support is only offered via e-mail, no form. Second is their use of the word “weather” – in this case, it should have been “whether” – so I deduct half a point for these small issues. Great job overall from Digg!

Skype

Skype provided an easy way to contact them. I am not including their reply because it was very, very exhaustive. Suffice to say they answered my question and in case their solution did not work, a way to escalate my issue.

Edgeio

Provided a form with a confirmation that showed what I submitted. I like that kind of confirmation. Reply came in about 24 hours and is listed below.

Yes, that would be an appropriate thing to list on edgeio.

On Oct 7, 2006, at 3:46 PM, wrote:

> To: (removed)
> From: (removed)
> Subject: [support]
>
> Someone left feedback on edgeio with the following information:
>
> email address: (removed)
> edgeio user name:
>
> ip address: (removed)
> cookied user name:
> cookied location: 0
>
> web page: http://www.edgeio.com/
>
> subject: [support]
>
> [description]
>
> ———————————————————————-> —
> hi – can you tell me if i can list old magazines on edgeio? i found a ton of old magazines like Forbes and Fortune and stuff and want > to get rid of them. Thanks, Allen

Matt Kaufman

Comments: Good job on the quick reply, and for including my original question inside the reply. Points deducted for listing all of the techy information inside the reply. As a mainstream application, there is no reason to include things like ip address, cookied user name, location, etc. The average Internet user would have no idea what those things are and would probably only confuse the situation.

Faces

Faces provided an easy way to contact them. Their reply and my original question is listed below.

Hi,
This email has been sent to help you with your problem at faces.com. The problem or question you had is repeated below. If you have further queries please return to the help page.

Currently we have a fairly small upload size restriction on files size – which only allows 8meg at a time – can you split the podcats up into 2 or 3 parts perhaps?

Thanks, Support
www.faces.com
———————————————————–
The question you had is:
———————————–
Member Id : Not available
Received : 10/7/2006 5:17:46 PM
Name : Not available
Email : removed
Subject : Site Problems
Comment : hi – can i upload my podcasts to faces and then put a player on my web site? they are like 20mb size and like 30 minutes each.
thanks, allen
Url : Not specified

UserAgent & IP Address Info
—————————————–
UserAgent : Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Ip Address : removed

Comments: Reply came in 4 days, which I guess is still reasonable. I would have liked a confirmation on when to expect the reply. Also – they have included this technical information which has no need to be included and can confuse non-geeks. In the email they state that if I have further queries (whats a query) to return to the help page. Where is the help page and why can’t they include a link to it? A small spelling error “podcats”. They did a good job of appearing human and overall a pretty good job.

Yelp

I had the hardest time finding a way to contact support on Yelp. Once I found it, they “accepted” my request that I submitted. Their reply came within 24 hours and is listed below.

Yes you can review anything with an address, including CVS!

Jeremy

See all my reviews…

http://jeremy.yelp.com

(removed) wrote:
> Can people really write reviews on anything? I saw some reviews on drugstores and wanted to write a review about my favorite CVS location but wondered if that is ok. Please let me know. Thanks, Allen

Comments: Reply came quickly and was well formed. I am deducting points for not being able to find the support form.

Flickr

Flickr provided a reply in about 36 hours and it is below.

Hello,

Thanks for your question.

Please see this answer in our FAQ:

http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/#28

Regards, Monish

Comments: Why couldn’t they just copy the answer into the email. Why should I do the work to go find it? It would have been appreciated if they would have included the applicable FAQ and then perhaps a link to the full FAQ. In addition, they should have included my original request.

MySpace

MySpace accepted my inquiry (written while looking at HORRIBLE banner ads that flash so much, I think I have a disease now) and then replied in 36 hours with the following:

Hello,
If you can’t create an account, we recommend deleting your browser’s cookies and temporary internet files and then close all your browsers and try signing up again.

(Note: Mac users should use Safari or Firefox.)

Make sure you didn’t add any spaces at the end of your email address or verification code.

If someone is using your email address please send us an email from that email address to verify you are the legal owner and we will be able to delete that fake profile.

If you are shown an error message when attempting to create an account, please copy and paste it into the body of your reply email.

If this does not answer your question, please click:

http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=misc.contact

Thank you,
MySpace.com

Comments: My inquiry was not included so to some extent I have no idea what they are replying to. In addition, their reply was an automated reply that seems to have multiple answers so I have no idea what actually applies to me. And then they have the nerve to state that if these solutions did not answer my question, I can go back and look at a horrible banner ad and try to fill in the exact same form again.

YouTube

I am not going to paste in their reply because all they did was send me every FAQ they have. I asked if my mother could view the videos using WebTV. Nothing in their 200 line reply offered me anything. They told me basically if none of these 50 suggestions work, I should e-mail them AGAIN and they will look into my question. So who knows how long that entire process would take. I guess all of it is moot now that they are billionaires. Oh well, maybe they can buy some support staff now with their money.

Technorati

Unfortunately, Technorati is at the bottom of this list. I really like their service and so this upsets me but I must report the truth. They did not reply to any of my inquiries. So there is nothing for me to include.

(updated) – I was finally able to contact Liz (the vlog woman) via her Flickr account because there are no contact emails on the Technorati site. She was able to get their customer service person to answer my questions and both her and the cs person apologized and stated that they are swamped with cs e-mails. My suggestion is to provide an immediate automated reply stating that. I would have been a lot more relaxed with them had they said they were swamped. But to receive nothing is to believe they don’t care.

So I am willing to upgrade their score:

(I guess that is still passing in some universities)

Find more stories about: Customer Service, Digg, edgeio, Flickr, Insights, Technorati, Yelp